Microsoft's decision to call the next version of its OS Vista might have a raised a few smiles last week but one Redmond resident is less than impressed. The boss of Vista, a software and services company for small businesses is considering taking legal action against the software giant.

A man was last week fined £500 after a British jury found him guilty of using a neighborhood wireless broadband connection without permission. Gregory Straszkiewicz, 24, was also sentenced to a 12 months conditional discharge after he was convicted of dishonestly obtaining an communications service and related offences at London's Islewoth Crown Court last Wednesday (20 July).

Bulldog - which has received a barrage of complaints about its unbundled broadband and telephone service - is considering lodging a formal complaint against BT over its alleged failure to migrate punters over to the Cable & Wireless (C&W) owned ISP.

The Victoria & Albert Museum in London is hosting an exhibition of high-fashion hearing aids, called Hearwear, in a bid to rehabilitate the devices and make them seem more attractive to those who might need them.

The European Telecommunications Standard Institute ETSI has approved the DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadcasting) standards for the delivery of multimedia content and services "on the move". France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain and the UK are all preparing to conduct DMB trials to enable the integration of audio, data and video.

SD cards aren't exciting products. They do what they're supposed to: slip into your digital camera, PDA or whatever as removable storage. Most of the time there's little to differentiate one from another, bar read and write speed. But this particular SD card is very different from any other SD card you're likely to find and it's definitely far more convenient, writes Riyad Emeran.

The US Federal Trade Commission last week launched a crack down on xxx-rated spam with legal action against seven firms that have allegedly flouted laws requiring warning labels on smutty emails. Four of the seven companies agreed to pay a total of $1.159m in penalties and to abide by federal rules requiring warning labels on emails with sexually-explicit content and the US federal CAN-SPAM Act.

TippingPoint, a division of networking giant 3Com, plans to pay researchers for information about unannounced vulnerabilities in major systems and software and will add bonuses for prolific flaw finders, the company announced on Monday.

Outbound spyware transmissions from infested machines accounted for up to eight per cent of total outbound web traffic in pilot tests of a new managed spyware screening service. UK web security firm ScanSafe said the volume of traffic observed during a 10-week pilot test of its Spyware Screening service showed that spyware applications are becoming stealthier in their ability to hide their outbound 'covert' channels among normal web traffic. That's bad news because data sent when spyware "calls-home" can include confidential and even privileged information.

A group of researchers has proposed a mechanism that could explain the presence of so much methane on Titan - life. The moon's atmosphere is around five per cent methane, and NASA researcher Chris McKay speculates that some of it could be being generated by hydrogen-breathing microbes.

The Government last week confirmed that the UK's planned ID card is intended to operate as a 'passport lite' that could be used for travel within the European Union, and signalled that Home Office thinking may be moving towards the use of a PIN as a common mechanism for verification. The card's operation as a passport, said Under Secretary of State Andy Burnham, dictates that it will need to use ICAO standard RFID contactless reader technology, while use of chip and PIN would allow it to be compatible with banking and retail systems.